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WHAT IT'S ABOUT:

Private investigator Philip Marlowe (Bogart) gets tangled in a seedy web of murder and vice when he's hired by wealthy scion General Sternwood (Charles Waldron) to investigate a pornographer with incriminating photos of his daughter, Carmen (Martha Vickers). Marlowe finds the man-dead-and eventually teams with the general's other daughter, ravishing Vivian (Bacall), who assists him in highly unpleasant detective work.

WHY I LOVE IT:

Scripted by William Faulkner from Raymond Chandler's complex detective novel, Howard Hawks's "The Big Sleep" is a Hollywood whodunit of the highest order. Bogart famously cemented his trench-coated, tough-guy persona tackling the role of Chandler's shamus protagonist, Philip Marlowe, co-starring alongside young wife Bacall. "Sleep" piles up so many twists, turns, and bodies that ultimately you can't tell who killed whom- neither, apparently, could Chandler--but the Bogart-Bacall star wattage and Hawks's expert direction are such that you really don't care.

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